Quake victims perish as aid deadlock continues

Scarce supplies: a makeshift operating theatre at the general hospital in Port-au-Prince

Juan Barreto: AFP

Morphine has run out in Haiti's capital as doctors race to amputate the crushed limbs of earthquake survivors before infection kills them.

Eight days after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake flattened parts of the country, bottlenecks at the Port-au-Prince airport are still holding up the arrival of vital aid.

The United States has deployed 10,000 troops to the region to help distribute food and water and provide security, and the United Nations is also boosting its peacekeeping force in the region to 14,500.

Despite the huge global response to the disaster, which may have claimed up to 200,000 lives and left millions homeless, aid still has not found its way to many of those affected.

Loris de Filippi, an emergency coordinator for Medecins Sans Frontieres, says supplies are running so low that doctors had to buy a saw from local markets to continue amputations at a makeshift hospital in Haiti's capital.

"I have never seen anything like this. Any time I leave the operating theatre I see lots of people desperately asking to be taken for surgery," she said.

"Today, there are 12 people who need lifesaving amputations at Choscal Hospital. We were forced to buy a saw in the market to continue amputations. We are running against time here."

Ms de Filippi says a plane carrying 12 tonnes of medical equipment, including drugs, surgical supplies and dialysis machines has been turned away three times from the Port-au-Prince airport since Sunday night.

"We have had five patients in Martissant health centre die for lack of the medical supplies that this plane was carrying," she said.

Another worker at the Choscal Hospital in City Soliel, a shanty town in the capital, says it is like operating in a war zone.